Crew
Director/Producer/Animation – Bill Plympton, Screenplay – Maureen McElheron, Bill Plympton & P.C. Vey, Music – Maureen McElheron. Production Company – Bill Plympton.
Voices
Daniel Neiden (Del), Maureen McElheron (Dee), Marty Nelson (Mayor/Mr Mega/Mrs Mega), Chris Hoffman (The Wiseone/Surfer/Tango Dancer/Note), Jimmy Ceribello (Cabbie), Emily Bindiger (Dot), Jeff Knight (Bellhop), Jennifer Senko (Surfer/Note)
Plot
Del struggles to complete the last line of a song. His boss Mr Mega gives his 45 minutes to do so. At the same time, Del’s girlfriend Dee, the secretary at Mega Music, is waiting for him to meet her. In search of inspiration, Del drives off and comes to the town of Flooby Nooby where the rules of the ordinary world are very different. There everybody discovers the tune in their heart. Del meets with various denizens of the town as he seeks a means to complete his song.
The Tune was the first feature film from animator Bill Plympton. Plympton began in the late 1960s as a cartoonist, gaining some success and publishing in high-profile magazines and newspaper syndication. He started making animated shorts in 1968 and has made dozens of these over the years. One of these, the three-minute short Your Face (1987), was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards. This considerably boosted Plympton’s profile with he then taking on commercials work. He later accrued another Academy Award nomination for the short Guard Dog (2004).
Subsequent to The Tune, Plympton has made eight feature-length animated films with I Married a Strange Person (1997), Mutant Aliens (2004), Hair High (2004), Idiot and Angels (2011), Cheatin’ (2013), Hitler’s Folly (2016), Revengeance (2016) and Slide (2023), as well as the H is for Head Games segment of ABCs of Death 2 (2014), the On Eating and Drinking segment of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (2014) and the A True Story segment of The One-Minute Memoir (2020). In addition, he has made three live-action films with J. Lyle (1994), Guns on the Clackamas: A Documentary (1995) and Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet (1997), the latter two being mockumentaries.
The Tune gained distinction for being the first full-length animated film where the director drew every single frame himself. The Tune is early Bill Plympton, nevertheless all his characteristic stylistic effects are there. There are the bizarre transformations – when Del’s car drives along the road it manages to transform into just about every wheeled vehicle imaginable from a truck to a motorcycle to a tank, a tractor, an RV, golf scooter, bulldozer, tricycle, ice cream truck, a parade float and a getaway vehicle.
The Tune is not quite as way as sophisticated in the outrageousness of its imagery as later Plympton works like I Married a Strange Person. Nevertheless, it has its share of pure dementia. One of these is a song number with dancing food – a hamburger dances with a French Fry, spaghetti with tomato sauce, a cherry pie with a glob of cream, bacon and a fried egg, and a hot dog and bun. Or the range of surreal hotel rooms that Del is taken on a tour of, getting a glimpse in each door from the Grim Reaper to a man being eaten by a hamburger to a woman incinerated by rocket exhaust and another being attacked by an eraser and her image erased.
There is also an hilarious sequence with two men who start punching one another in the face that escalates into a surreally over-the-top fight scene with them firing cannons up the other’s nostril, planting sticks of dynamite in a neck stump, electrocuting the other, putting plant growth on the other’s head then using a lawnmower, and placing animals down the other’s throat.
The screenplay comes from Maureen McElheron who also writes the music and voices Del’s secretary girlfriend Dee. Her score is notable for covering a host of musical styles from Country and Western to blues to surfer rock to even having Del conducting an impression of Elvis at one point.
Trailer here